Why Social Media Marketing Is Really Remarketing – Here’s Why #143

If you’re only using social media to scatter broadcast your brand messages, you’re missing out on the full power of the medium.

In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Stone Temple’s Mark Traphagen explains why the most effective social media marketing uses the power of remarketing, and gives some ideas of how to do that.

Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.

Resources

Transcript

Eric: Mark, you’re claiming that marketing in social media is really remarketing. Before we get into why you think that, briefly explain what remarketing is.

Mark: Well sure, Eric. At the simplest level, remarketing is identifying likely prospects and potential customers and then serving to them a systematic series of encounters with your brand that lead them toward a sale.

Eric: And that’s radically different from the more common spray and pray practice on social media where you just keep serving up random messages to random people, hoping they’ll randomly hit the right people at the right time.

Mark: Yes, very different. I mean, doing that is slipping back to the old days of TV and radio ads or billboards. Broadcast messaging has its place, but on social media, if that’s all you do, you’re wasting it’s true power and potential.

Eric: Why is remarketing the best way then, to sell on social media?

Mark: Because it takes advantage of the unique abilities of social media to find and identify a target audience and to sequence messages to them to lead them along a journey to doing business with you.

Eric: How does that actually work then?

Mark: At the simplest level, and we’ve all seen this online by now, you set a cookie for anyone who’s visited your site and then target them with ads or social media posts or offers that keep their brand and their attention. Now at the next level, you watch for specific products they’ve looked at on your site, or maybe even added to a shopping cart without checking out, and target them with ads or social media messages for those products. Now in that case, you’re just trying to capture lost sales where maybe the person did intend to buy but got distracted or delayed for some other reason.

Eric: But I suspect from what you said before that those forms of remarketing aren’t using the full power of social media. Am I right?

Mark: Very right. The most effective social selling combines general organic messaging with more specific targeted paid campaigns.

Eric: How does that work?

Mark: First your organic social should be messaging that’s casting a broad net to attract people who have a genuine interest in what your company does or provides. Now, at that stage, you aren’t selling anything yet, you’re just building brand awareness and reinforcing the credibility of your brand.

Next, you want figure out from all the people who see your social media messages, which are most likely to be interested in your business. Now Facebook makes that really easy thanks to the Facebook pixel. The pixel is code you put on your site that triggers whenever a Facebook user visits your site. The pixel allows Facebook to identify users who have had enough interest to at least look at your site and even what pages or products they looked at.

Eric: And so now you’ve got a more qualified audience.

Mark: Exactly. If someone has visited your site, they have shown that they at least have some interest in you and they are certainly aware of your brand. Now in the Facebook Ad Manager, you can turn those people into a custom audience and send them slightly more aggressive message than you would to the general social media population, such as a special offer for a product they looked at or more specific information about what you offer and how that meets their needs.

Eric: So now you’ve moved your messaging from broadcast to specific and targeted.

Mark: Yes, but wait, that’s not all, as they say. The next level of magic comes through sequencing.

Eric: Sequencing?

Mark: Sequencing is programming a series of messages designed to move the prospect along the journey to becoming a customer. Now one way to do that in Facebook is to create custom audiences based on those who visited your site over a certain time. Say the first group is people who visited your site within the past two days. Then the second group is people who visited within four days, excluding the two-day visitor. A third group is six-day visitors, excluding four days and so forth. What you’re doing is you’ve designed a different piece of content for each of those audiences, leading them along in their journey to becoming a customer. Now the effect is that, in this example, every two days the person who visited your site gets the next programmed message.

Eric: Brilliant.

Mark: And effective. Now most people don’t become a customer with one encounter with your brand. Combining the power of organic and paid social and using it to send programmed messages for each step of a typical customer journey, is simply utilizing the full power of social media to sell.

Eric: Thanks, Mark. And if you’d like to learn more about how to use social media more effectively to build your business, we invite you to get in touch with us. Just go to www.stonetemple.com and click the “Contact Us” button at the top of each page.

Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.

Comments

In my opinion, re-targeting is time-consuming and also it has a low conversion rate. The lower number of people in the campaign at any given time due to retargeting ads expiring once the user has been absent from the site for more than 30 days and you’ve to add a lot of javascript codes on all the product pages.

If your message lacks the magic needed, it will fail, no matter how many times you use it or reuse it. If you pay to be sprayed even in the right targeted pools, it will still be seen as piss in the water.

You need to refine the messaging and the product and service in the first place so that it is happily shared because of the distilled value it captures.